Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression - Writing and the Christian Poet III: Getting Down to Writing

Writing and the Christian Poet III: Getting Down to Writing

Written by Brad Fruhauff

Monday, 09 June 2008

Brad Fruhauff continues his series on the Craft of Christian Poetry with his third installment on the essentials of Christian poetry.

I can’t seem to reduce all my thoughts on the subject of writing poetry down to just three posts, so I’m going to stop trying to predict just how many more of these there will be. I’ve previously suggested that poetry of any variety loves the world and doesn’t need to waste time trying to prove anything. I went on to say that poetry I like tends to surprise, transform, play, redeem, or sacramentalize. For this post, technically number 3, I said I would give some ideas on how to do these things.

If it feels like it’s been a long time coming, that may be because I’ve been trying to avoid it. What can I really tell you that you haven’t already heard or are likely to hear again from the place I got it? It turns out I can tell you all sorts of things, but the most important is that you have to write. I’ll probably blog more about that later. You can read advice on top of advice, but you’re going to have to write at some point. Knowledge is power, but it ain’t art.

Christian Intuition

Write about what? Well: nothing and everything. It’s not necessarily what you write about as how you do it that makes it poetry. And it’s sometimes no more than the fact that the writer was a Christian that makes it “Christian” poetry. If a poem is going to surprise me, it is probably not because the poet pulled some clever technical gag, reworked a Bible story, or said anything about spiritual experience—it may be that, but it’s more likely the poet opened me up to something I had never seen, felt or thought before, or a way of seeing, feeling or thinking about something, or a way of experiencing the words we use to talk about things. We often call such a power “vision,” but visual metaphors in Western culture are caught up with conceptual knowledge and quickly become confusing—that is, we tend to think that to have vision is to have unique or quirky ideas. Ideas are great, but poetry works in forms and patterns: meter, rhythm, rhyme—Frost spoke of the “shape a poem makes.” Poetic vision, then, is about organizing one’s raw materials (fundamentally, language) into some meaningful shape.

The Christian poet will, or should, have a Christian vision—or what I am calling here intuition. The Christian poet still works with language and form, but the meaning of her experiences, of her language, her “raw materials,” will always be bent according to a distinctively Christian intuition, a Christian sense of the world.

This is not to be perspectival. I do not believe that a Christian and a Buddhist simply have different interpretations of experience—that would reduce religious arguments to the level of fighting over the taste of lettuce. Rather, their beliefs and traditions condition them so that they actually experience the world differently from each other. Meaning is experienced as much as interpreted—or maybe we need to separate out kinds of meanings. In either case, poetry is in part the language of these disparate and distinct experiences.

When one is moved to great emotion, one wants to show another that moving thing—whether from love or anger or amusement or spite (but always, ultimately, from love). To do that poetically requires a trained awareness to the contours, colors and temperatures of the thing, to its motion, its volume, its cast, its repose. The poet draws these things together for many reasons: to share, to name, to comfort, to encourage, to empower. The Christian poet has to be both devoutly Christian and devoutly poetic, training herself to chase the names for the events and emotions that constitute a shared life. Don’t put limitations on the Spirit—rather, seek and expect to find. Or, better, seek and expect your reader to find.

To say the poet chases names just begs for some remarks on avoiding cliché, but they will have to wait for another time. If I were to leave you with one thing for the time being, it would be to trust your intuition and to always require more of it. God doesn’t require that we quote a psalm in every poem we write; he requires that we worship and obey him whether we’re writing a poem or cashing out the till. To paraphrase Augustine, then: Love God, then write what you will.

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Brad is pursuing a PhD in English at Loyola University Chicago. He occasionally contributes book and music reviews to the Burnside Writer's Collective, and his story "The Strangler" appeared in the first issue of the Ankeny Briefcase. He is by temperament something of an Ancient - "a grumpy old man," as his (young) wife puts it - and does not believe a good idea goes bad by going out of fashion. He has not found a better dictum for poetics than "to instruct and delight" (Horace). In application he believes these are very hard to balance: a pleasant poem may yet be vacuous, and a didactic poem is almost always bad. A poem instructs by being itself, and the poet never knows just what her reader will learn. He wishes to say that good poetry is true, but the truth is not always poetry. He is currently excited about the novels of Marilynne Robinson and Orhan Pamuk, and enjoys the poetry of Auden, Donne, Hopkins, Tennyson and, more recently, Scott Cairns.

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Chestertonian_Rambler

|2008-06-11 06:24:27

Perhaps food for further posts here, but I'm curious as to how you think
religiously-oriented poetic traditions and incomplete faith work into this.

You
said that people's "beliefs and traditions condition them so that they
actually experience the world differently," a condition profoundly reflected
in poetry. I agree.

Yet the situation becomes complex if one accepts the
common dictum that (as Lewis put it) people are not all 100% Christian or 100%
nonchristian. The atheist Derek Walcott, for instance, can appropriate John
Donne in a way that brings to the forefront Donne's Christian messages and
places them appropriately in the context of contemporary society (I'm thinking
"Ruins of a Great House"

. And a Christian poet can express in poetry
genuine rage, bitterness, despair, doubt, or a variety of other decidedly
non-Christian impulses or ideas--either originating from selfish desire or the
outside pressures of his age.

It's a very good thing to say "love God, then
write what you will." But I think that, to some extent, one question every
poet needs to ask is how far to allow his or her sinfulness and rebellion to be
expressed in published poetry. Should one "write poetry, and then try to
love God?" Or should one wait until a certain amount of certainty of
writing God-centered poetry before writing?

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